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David Hajdu

David Hajdu is the music critic of The Nation. Hajdu is a professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and has written on the arts for numerous publications, including The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The New Republic, Rolling Stone, and Vanity Fair. As an editor and magazine writer, Hajdu has been a finalist for the National Magazine Award several times, and his articles and essays have been selected for a number of anthologies, including Best Music Writing, Best American Magazine Writing, The New York Times Arts & Culture Reader, and Best American Comics Writing.

Hajdu is the award-winning author of four books: Lush Life: A Biography of Billy Strayhorn; Positively 4th Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Fariña and Richard Fariña; The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic Book Scare and How It Changed America; and Heroes and Villains: Essays on Music, Movies, Comics, and Culture. He is a three-time finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and two-time winner of the ASCAP Deems-Taylor Award. Hajdu is presently at work on a history of popular music, to be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.